Author: RareHippo News
When the cryptocurrency bitcoin first made its appearance in 2009, an interesting divergence of opinions about it rapidly emerged. Journalists tended to regard it as some kind of incomprehensible money-laundering scam, while computer scientists, who were largely agnostic about bitcoin’s prospects, nevertheless thought that the distributed-ledger technology (the so-called blockchain) that underpinned the currency was a Big Idea that could have far-reaching consequences. In this conviction they were joined by legions of techno-libertarians who viewed the technology as a way of enabling economic life without the oppressive oversight of central banks and other regulatory institutions. Blockchain technology had the potential to change the…
Lukka, a crypto firm that provides data services and enterprise software tools, has raised $110 million in a Series E funding round and is now valued at $1.3 billion. Global asset manager Marshall Wace led Lukka’s Series E round, with Miami International Holdings, Summer Capital, and SiriusPoint also participating. Previous investors Soros Fund Management, Liberty City Ventures, S&P Global, and CPA.com also joined the round, who all contributed to Lukka’s $53 million Series D funding in March 2021. With fresh capital in hand, New York-based Lukka plans to expand globally. Lukka CEO Robert Materazzi said with the crypto industry entering a new phase…
Payment processor Checkout.com said on Wednesday its valuation had hit $40 billion following the completion of a $1 billion Series D funding round. The raise secures its place as one of Europe’s most valuable start-ups and more than doubles its valuation since its Series C a year ago when it raised $450 million at a $15 billion valuation. The company said in a release that in that time, it has tripled the volume of transactions processed for the third year in a row. The company serves large-scale e-commerce and services merchants like Netflix, Farfetch, and Sony; fintech unicorns such as Klarna, Qonto,…
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele is probably the only head of state in the world who uses public funds to trade Bitcoin with his phone. So far, it appears he’s lost money. That’s because the process is shrouded in secrecy, though the country has bought at least 1,391 Bitcoins, based on what the 40-year-old Bukele has said on Twitter. The purchase Bukele says he’s made would have cost the Central American country about $71 million based on an average acquisition price of $51,056 per token using the date and time of his tweets, as calculated by Bloomberg. Assuming the government…
Cody Wilson is hunkered down in a dimly lit warehouse behind the headquarters of Defense Distributed, the Austin, Texas company best known as the maker of the first 3D printed plastic gun. As a film crew shines a spotlight on him to record a demonstration of his new Zero Percenter desktop software, a vast library containing 11,000 books, films and 3-D printable gun blueprints appears from the blackness behind him. His new software is capable of turning a raw block of aluminum into the receiver for an AR-15 assault rifle in just three hours. Wilson, who describes himself as a…
There’s room for privately issued stablecoins to exist alongside a possible central bank digital currency, according to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The Fed plans to publish a report on digital currencies in the coming weeks, Powell said at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Tuesday. The central bank hasn’t said whether it plans to launch its own digital dollar akin to efforts underway in other counties such as China. The Fed and other U.S. watchdogs have previously said stablecoins need more regulation and should be issued by banks. When asked by Senator Pat Toomey, the top Republican on the panel,…
Norton is synonymous with antivirus software, but the Norton 360 suite offers more than just that functionality. It now comes with Norton Crypto, a mining tool that users will not be able to uninstall. This has left many users feeling frustrated as they try to remove this unwelcome addition. Crypto mining collates users who order new ‘blocks’ of transactions that are then added to the aptly named blockchain, earning coins and transaction fees. For maximum efficiency, people use particular hardware to mine cryptocurrency. But this hardware usually becomes redundant in a year or two, and when coupled with energy consumption,…
Victims of a $200 million hack of popular cryptocurrency exchange BitMart are still waiting for their money even after over a month since the exchange was hacked. Hackers stole various crypto tokens on December 4, after using a stolen privacy key to gain access to one of BitMart’s hot wallets, reports CNBC.Shortly after the hacking, BitMart announced that it would use its own funding “to cover the incident and compensate affected users”. BitMart said in a statement that it would use its own money to reimburse victims of the large-scale security breach, which the exchange blamed on a stolen private key.…
Just as the price of bitcoin has steadily declined from highs of near $70,000 to around $42,000 today, so too have the share prices of the biggest crypto mining companies fallen. But the decline of those mining stocks — which experts believe represent a kind of turbo-charged proxy for the price of bitcoin — has been even sharper than bitcoin’s. Several of the largest crypto miners have seen their share prices halve since the highs of November. Based on The Block Research’s data, the market capitalization of Nevada-based Marathon Patent Group has dropped from $7.65 billion in early November to roughly $3…
Prosecutors in the German state of Hesse tapped a local bank to “clean” cryptocurrencies worth about 100 million euros ($113 million) they seized in a criminal case against three drug traders. The anti-cybercrime unit of the Frankfurt General Prosecutor turned to Bankhaus Scheich Wertpapierspezialist AG, a specialist in digital assets, to return the cryptocurrency to regular circulation, the agency said in a statement Wednesday. The pair said they will cooperate in future criminal cases to put confiscated cryptocurrencies back into the markets. The 100 million worth of digital currency was sold within a week earlier this month, Bankhaus Scheich said.…